Koula Sylla, a commercial fisherman living in Renton, became a U.S. citizen in 2013 after living 19 years in the country. Now Justice Department attorneys are fighting to strip him of his citizenship, contending he failed to disclose asylum applications he made in the months after arriving in from West Africa.

Koula Sylla, a commercial fisherman living in Renton, became a U.S. citizen in 2013 after living 19 years in the country. Now Justice Department attorneys are fighting to strip him of his citizenship, contending he failed to disclose asylum applications he made in the months after arriving in from West Africa.

Justice Department attorneys have asked a federal judge in Seattle to revoke the U.S. citizenship awarded to the commercial fisherman in 2013. The government faults Sylla, an African refugee and U.S. resident of 23 years, for failing to disclose asylum claims he may have made under other names in the mid-1990s.

If Sylla loses his citizenship, the 54-year-old will be one of the first Americans denaturalized who was identified through the large but little-noticed Homeland Security Department review of aged immigration documents. Hundreds of naturalized citizens could find their citizenship at risk due to the same probe.

Citizenship revocation actions remain rare, but it is on the rise. That upward trend seems likely to continue with a nativist White House that has staked out hardline positions on immigration.

Naturalization – becoming a citizen – is the final step for immigrants integrating into America. Unlike a green card or visa, citizenship entitles an immigrant to all the rights available to native-born Americans. Naturalization is meant to be permanent, and can only be revoked if it was obtained through fraud.

What qualifies as citizenship fraud, though, is far from clear.

‘Who among us could pass that test?’

The naturalization process centers on a lengthy questionnaire populated with vague, open-ended questions. One of the most notorious asks a would-be citizen to describe any crimes they have committed, even if they were not arrested.

In a recent U.S. Supreme Court hearing, Chief Justice John Roberts asked whether foreign-born Americans could lose their citizenship for failing to tell immigration officials they broke the speed limit 20 years before. The Justice Department answer? Yes.

“That shows just how ridiculous the naturalization process has become,” said Manny Vargas, senior counsel with the Immigrant Defense Project.

“Who among us could pass that test?” the veteran immigrant rights attorney said Saturday speaking from New York.

In its final years, the Obama administration began stripping citizenships at a tempo not matched by purges in the 1980s and 1990s targeting naturalized Nazi war criminals. President Donald Trump’s Justice Department is maintaining or increasing that pace.

Sylla is not even a petty criminal. He has maintained a clean criminal record during his 23 years in the United States, and there are no allegations that he has hidden crimes committed before he fled Africa.

Attorney Gary Yerman said Sylla is clearly not the type of criminal Trump promised would be the focus of immigration authorities’ efforts.

“I don’t know why he was selected,” Yerman said. “But there’s so much randomness involved, I’m not surprised. … People who don’t deserve to get pulled in get pulled in.”

“The U.S. (Customs and Immigration Service) investigation team’s budget must have exploded,” the attorney remarked, tongue in cheek.

As Yerman describes it, immigration investigators have wide latitude on whose history they choose to comb through. There is no control, other than the discretion of Justice Department attorneys who decide whether to file criminal or civil actions against citizens who may have misrepresented themselves.

Nicole Navas Oxman, a Justice Department spokeswoman, said the department’s civil division has litigated “numerous denaturalization cases like” Sylla’s. She and spokespersons for other agencies tasked with immigration matters declined to offer specifics on the number of other denaturalization actions.

A SeattlePI review of federal filings found 88 denaturalization cases filed in the past eight years, including six in the first four months of 2017. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have said they have completed investigations into another 120 citizens they contend could be denaturalized and deported.

Last year, a Homeland Security Department audit uncovered 1,811 naturalized citizens suspected of using aliases during earlier immigration proceedings. It is not clear whether the Justice Department intends to pursue claims against a sizeable portion of that group.

That group represents a small sliver of the 20 million naturalized citizens living in the United States. It’s estimated that another 8 ½ million U.S. residents could become citizens if they chose.

While the U.S. Supreme Court is currently considering claims from a Serbian woman stripped of her citizenship for lying to immigration officials, what happens next for the naturalized citizens identified during the Homeland Security internal investigation is an open question. Their future depends largely on the Justice Department’s willingness to pursue the claims, as it opted to against Sylla.

Desperate bids for asylum

Sylla's story is difficult to tell, in part because of all the stories he is said to have told to stay in the United States.

Like most countries, the United States has procedures meant to help immigrants facing physical danger. Endangered immigrants who apply for entry while overseas are deemed refugees; those who come forward after arriving are asylum seekers.

Sylla sought asylum. He appears to be from Mauritania, a West African country notable for its high rate of slavery, though he may have claimed to be Rwandan in an asylum application filed a year after the genocide there.

In statements filed in the mid-1990s, Sylla said he had been beaten and jailed in Mauritania before being made a slave and deported to Senegal. Sylla is black; at the time, Arab leaders were enslaving, killing or deporting black Mauritanians.

Sylla arrived in Miami illegally on March 17, 1994. Asylum was his best path to legal status, but it was hard to come by in the 1990s.

In 1996, America’s immigration courts granted just 5,100, or 17 percent, of the 84,300 applications for asylum brought before them. Twenty years later, 43 percent of asylum seekers saw their applications approved.

Sylla first filed for asylum in December 1995. In that application, he claimed Mauritanian soldiers attacked his family six years before. He resisted, he said, and was jailed with the rest of his family. After months of hard labor he was taken to a river and forced to cross into Senegal.

He claimed to have lived in a refugee camp in Senegal when a friend arranged for him to board a boat.

“Sylla stated that he did not know or care where the ship was going but only wanted a better life,” a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent said in recent court filings, recounting Sella’s 1996 interview with an immigration officer.

That officer rejected Sella’s claims and referred the case to an immigration court judge. For an illegal immigrant, a failed asylum application usually ends with a deportation order. It did for Sylla; he appears to have missed that hearing, prompting the judge to deny his asylum application and order that he be deported.

Sylla, who was working as a street vendor in New York at the time, is alleged to have again applied for asylum two months later using the name Jean Batouga. The application described a Rwandan Tutsi who lost his entire family to ethnic violence there.

An immigration officer again routed the application to a judge after finding the claims wanting. Sylla failed to appear for a September 1996 hearing and was again ordered deported.

Court records do not show whether either deportation order was served on Sylla. All of his asylum applications appear to have been prepared for him by someone else, and it is not clear if Sylla read English at the time.

Sylla applied for asylum a third time in October 1996. The application states that he had not used other names or previously filed for asylum.

An immigration court judge granted Sylla’s asylum application on March 2, 1998. Sylla was issued a green card eight years later, and applied to become a naturalized citizen in 2013.

Applying for citizenship, Sylla did not mention applying for asylum under two assumed names. He took an oath of allegiance to the United States and received his citizenship on May 9, 2013.

He may not get to keep it.

‘People are scared’

Department of Justice attorneys now claim Sylla “misrepresented and concealed material facts” while applying for citizenship. They contend his failure to admit his aliases – a disclosure that could have seen him deported – shows he lacks the character to be American.

Under law, a naturalized citizen may have their citizenship revoked if it is found to have been illegally obtained or obtained through a lie. Sylla’s case is being pursued in civil court, though similar allegations have resulted in criminal charges against other naturalized citizens.

For naturalized citizens, “it’s their worst nightmare,” said Yerman, the New York-based immigration attorney representing Sylla. “They’re being told that they’re no longer safe because the government is coming for them. …

One woman who lost her citizenship after she was convicted criminally of naturalization fraud has succeeded in bringing her case to the U.S. Supreme Court. Advocates for immigrant rights hope the court will limit the government’s ability to revoke citizenship for inconsequential misstatements.

Divna Maslenjak, a Serb born in what is now Bosnia-Herzegovina, came to the United States in 2000 as a refugee. Having settled in Akron, Ohio, Maslenjak applied for citizenship in 2006 and received it the following year.

As she was applying for citizenship, though, it was discovered that Maslenjak misrepresented her husband’s military service by claiming he had not joined the Bosnian Serb army during the genocidal civil war that saw Muslim Bosnians slaughtered by Christian Serbs. Maslenjak had hidden the fact that her husband served as an officer in a brigade that participated in the killing of 8,000 Muslims in the town of Srebrenica. She was convicted of naturalization fraud, had her citizenship revoked and was deported.

Maslenjak’s attorneys have now asked the Supreme Court to reverse that revocation because her misrepresentations, they claim, weren’t proven to have mattered in immigration proceedings. Immigrant rights advocates have joined Maslenjak’s attorneys in urging the Supreme Court to set a high standard for denaturalization.

A citizenship application contains up to 107 questions, many of which require detailed written answers. If unimportant omissions or lies can undermine an immigrant’s citizenship, fewer U.S. residents eligible for citizenship will seek it.

“The country as a whole benefits when immigrants become full and equal members of society,” attorney Theodore Howard said in a brief filed on behalf of 75 immigrant rights organizations. “The nation has a great deal to lose from discouraging naturalization by severely punishing citizens based on trivial misstatements and omissions made while seeking citizenship.”

Apparently one lie could be all it takes for some people to lose their citizenship. Josh King has the story (@abridgetoland).

Media: Buzz60

While their circumstances differ, core issue facing Maslenjak, Sylla and thousands of other naturalized citizens is the same: Should any misrepresentation or failure of disclosure, no matter how trivial, cost an American their citizenship?

“People are expected to disclose a ridiculous amount of information in a really broad way,” said Vargas, whose organization is among the groups asking the Supreme Court to limit the government’s ability to strip citizenship.

“We saw the potential for government abuse,” he continued. “That’s really a threat to a lot of members of the community.”

Operation Janus

Slow and hard fought, Maslenjak’s case is exceptional. Denaturalization is usually swift and uncontested.

A review of civil actions brought by Justice Department attorneys since 2009 shows that most naturalized citizens facing denaturalization surrendered their citizenship without a fight. Court records show the 82 of 88 denaturalization actions either ended in deportation or are ongoing; most defendants agreed to surrender their citizenship or lost in a preliminary hearing.

Public access to immigration matters is restricted. An examination of those that are accessible indicates the Justice Department has historically focused on criminals whose crimes were not discovered until they had been naturalized under a false name.

That’s not the case for Sylla. Instead he was identified for investigation following an inspector general investigation into the Homeland Security Department records system.

Announcing the results of the investigation in September, the internal investigators concluded that 148,000 old records had not been filed a new Homeland Security data repository. Additional records from an FBI repository were found to have been omitted as well. Homeland Security investigators identified 1,811 cases where it appeared that citizenship had been awarded to a person facing deportation under another name.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement “has investigated few of these naturalized citizens to determine whether they should be denaturalized, but is now taking steps to increase the number of cases to be investigated, particularly those who hold positions of public trust and who have security clearances,” Inspector General John Roth said in the Sept. 8 report.

The records problem was discovered in 2008, when a Customs and Border Protection worker identified 206 immigrants facing deportation orders who obtained permanent legal status – green cards – or citizenship using aliases. Homeland Security’s response, eventually named “Operation Janus,” was aimed at immigrants from countries that pose a national security concern to the United States.

All the missing records are now available, though few of the citizens who may have been naturalized in error have been investigated. Federal prosecutors declined to take 26 of the cases forwarded for criminal prosecution by investigators; two were being considered for denaturalization through the civil process now being used to strip Sylla’s citizenship.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials told the inspector general they had been dissuaded from pursuing such cases because they rarely result in criminal prosecution. A change came in late 2015, according to the inspector general report, when the Justice Department agreed to begin bringing claims against “individuals with Transportation Security Administration credentials, security clearances, positions of public trust or criminal histories.”

By September, ICE had identified 120 naturalized citizens investigators believed could be prosecuted and denaturalized. Sylla appears to be among them.

Supreme Court decision expected this month

A Department of Homeland Security biometric systems initially connected Sylla to the three asylum applications in 2013, the year Sylla filed for naturalization. Homeland Security agents began investigating in 2014.

Investigators claim his fingerprints were matched to cards taken during the asylum applications.

“Fingerprint comparisons are one of the many tools used routinely by Homeland Security Investigations agents during the course of an investigation, and are particularly useful in confirming a subject’s true identity,” Homeland Security spokeswoman Lori Haley said.

Department of Justice attorneys filed a civil action in late April, asking U.S. District Judge John Coughenour to revoke Sylla’s citizenship. Sylla is expected to make an initial appearance before Coughenour this fall. He is currently fishing in Alaska.

Vargas, of the Immigrant Defense Project, said the Supreme Court is expected to rule in the Maslenjak case later in June. That decision could have a direct bearing on Sylla’s case.